Christopher Hitchens: left-wing 'moran'

[troublemaker]

Hitch isn't such a bad guy except when he's being a poisonous fool. Now that Hunter Thompson's skills are greatly diminished Hitchens has become our most entertaining verbal hatchet man; his treatment of Bob Hope almost made me forgive Hitchens for his intellectually under-fed belief that deposing Saddam Hussein was a moral goal so pressing that its effectuation would be worth shit-canning American civilization.

Hitchens recently published a concise but more than sufficient demolition of Ronald Reagan's honesty and intellect that provided us with a giddy few moments of reading pleasure. ( http://slate.msn.com/id/2101842/ ) Hitchens then goes on to tar the left as appeasers of Soviet totalitarianism. Which some of them were, of course. (The nuclear freeze movement was roughly as stupid and irresponsible as teaching creationism in public schools, IMO) So by the end of the piece Hitchens succeeds in alienating 99% of readers. I'm down with that... I have nothing against arrogant writers testily explaining that everyone on the planet is some form of dolt.

But if you're going to go there then you oughtn't include passages like this along the way:

Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched.

That's just dumb, Hitchens. The word ballistic (derived from from Greek ballein, to throw) is used almost exclusively to mean objects with movement described by exterior ballistics, meaning objects with no independent motive force whose paths are governed by their environment; primarily by gravity. Like things thrown by a ballista, a type of catapult. Or even a frigging BALL, like a baseball, cannon ball or musket ball.

Ballistic and ballistics are not the same word. The ballistics of a cruise missile are both interior and exterior; a motor pushes the missile along like an airplane though gravity and air resistance continue to play a role. If all missiles are ballistic then all airplanes are also ballistic, and they ain't. (Hitchens may have an argument that requires invoking what ballistic meant two hundred years ago and if wants to start one of those crank campaigns about how words mean something other than what everyone in the world uses them to mean...)

To review: all things that fly through the air have ballistics but are only called ballistic when the only forces operating on them are external. No missile with fire shooting out of the end is ballistic. An ICBM starts as a rocket and then it's engines shut off and it drops like a stone or arrow. In that descent phase it is a ballistic object. A cruise missle is just a remote-controlled airplane full of explosives and it is never ballistic during its flight--it's always internally motivated.

There are two reasons I find Hitchen's gaffe so comical.

1) Because it's so willful. If you make an error that's one thing, but he goes out of his way to make an error in the course of trying to prove that everyone else is a clod.

2) Because Hitchen's confusion is similar to Reagan's confusion that Hitchen's is skewering. ICBMs cannot be recalled precisely because they are ballistic. If they were continuously guided they could be recalled! Dammit.

So hat's off to Hitchens. Being as dumb as Reagan in an article about how dumb Reagan was makes him left-wing "moran" of the week. (Moranism being making gaffes when explaining hos stupid someone is, derived from the infamous "Get a brain, Morans" Picture)